the climate of history

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The Climate of History: Four Theses by Dipesh

Chakrabarty Posted by DEBBANERJI | Published: DECEMBER 23, 2009

The Climate of History: Four Theses Dipesh Chakrabarty DIPESH CHAKRABARTY is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago and a professorial fellow at theResearch School of Humanities at the Australian National University.

The current planetary crisis of climate change or global warming elicits a variety of responses in individuals, groups, and governments, ranging from denial, disconnect, and

indifference to a spirit of engagement and activism of varying kinds and degrees. Theseresponses saturate our sense of the now. Alan Weisman’s best-selling book The World without Us suggests a thought experiment as a way of experiencing our present: “Supposethat the worst has happened. Human extinction is a fait accompli…. Picture a world from

which we all suddenly vanished…. Might we have left some faint, enduring mark on theuniverse?…Isit possible that, instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world

without us would miss us?”1

I am drawn to Weisman’s experiment as it tellingly demonstrates how the current crisis canprecipitate a sense of the present that disconnects the future from the past by putting such afuture beyond the grasp of historical sensibility. The discipline of history exists on theassumption that our past, present, and future are connected by a certain continuity of human experience. We normally envisage the future with the help of the same faculty thatallows us to picture the past. Weisman’s thought experiment illustrates the historicistparadox that inhabits contemporary moods of anxiety and concern about the finitude of humanity. To go along with Weisman’s experiment, we have to insert ourselves into a future“without us” in order to be able to visualize it. Thus, our usual historical practices for

visualizing times, past and future, times inaccessible to us personally—the exercise of historical understanding—are thrown into a deep contradiction and confusion. Weisman’sexperiment indicates how such confusion follows from our contemporary sense of thepresent insofar as that present gives rise to concerns about our future. Our historical senseof the present, in Weisman’s version, has thus become deeply destructive of our generalsense of history.



I will return to Weisman’s experiment in the last part of this essay. There is much in thedebate on climate change that should be of interest to those involved in contemporary discussions about history. For as the idea gains ground that the grave environmental risks of global warming have to do with excessive accumulation in the atmosphere of greenhousegases produced mainly through the burning of fossil fuel and the industrialized use of animal stock by human beings, certain scientific propositions have come into circulation inthe public domain that have profound, even transformative, implications for how we think about human history or about what the historian C. A. Bayly recently called “the birth of themodern world.”2 Indeed, what scientists have said about climate change challenges not only the ideas about the human that usually sustain the discipline of history but also the analyticstrategies that postcolonial and postimperial historians have deployed in the last twodecades in response to the postwar scenario of decolonization and globalization.

In what follows, I present some responses to the contemporary crisis from a historian’s

point of view. However, a word about my own relationship to the literature on climatechange—and indeed to the crisis itself— may be in order. I am a practicing historian with astrong interest in the nature of history as a form of knowledge, and my relationship to thescience of global warming is derived, at some remove, from what scientists and otherinformed writers have written for the education of the general public. Scientific studies of global warming are often said to have originated with the discoveries of the Swedishscientist Svante Arrhenius in the 1890s, but self-conscious discussions of global warming inthe public realm began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the same period in which socialscientists and humanists began to discuss globalization.3 However, these discussions haveso far run parallel to each other. While globalization, once recognized, was of immediateinterest to humanists and social scientists, global warming, in spite of a good number of

books published in the 1990s, did not become a public concern until the 2000s. The reasonsare not far to seek. As early as 1988 James Hansen, the director of NASA’s GoddardInstitute of Space Studies, told a Senate committee about global warming and laterremarked to a group of reporters on the same day, “It’s time to stop waffling…and say thatthe greenhouse effect is here and is affecting our climate.”4 But governments, beholden tospecial interests and wary of political costs, would not listen. George H. W. Bush, then thepresident of the United States, famously quipped that he was going to fight the greenhouseeffect with the “White House effect.”5 The situation changed in the 2000s when the

warnings became dire, and the signs of the crisis—such as the drought in Australia, frequentcyclones and brush fires, crop failures in many parts of the world, the melting of Himalayanand other mountain glaciers and of the polar ice caps, and the increasing acidity of the seasand the damage to the food chain— became politically and economically inescapable. Addedto this were growing concerns, voiced by many, about the rapid destruction of other speciesand about the global footprint of a human population poised to pass the nine billion mark

by 2050. 6

As the crisis gathered momentum in the last few years, I realized that all my readings intheories of globalization, Marxist analysis of capital, subaltern studies, and postcolonialcriticism over the last twenty-five years, while enormously useful in studying globalization,had not really prepared me for making sense of this planetary conjuncture within whichhumanity finds itself today. The change of mood in globalization analysis may be seen by comparing Giovanni Arrighi’s masterful history of world capitalism, The Long TwentiethCentury (1994), with his more recent Adam Smith in Beijing (2007), which, among otherthings, seeks to understand the implications of the economic rise of China. The first book, a



long meditation on the chaos internal to capitalist economies, ends with the thought of capitalism burning up humanity “in the horrors (or glories) of the escalating violence thathas accompanied the liquidation of the Cold War world order.” It is clear that the heat that

burns the world in Arrighi’s narrative comes from the engine of capitalism and not fromglobal warming. By the time Arrighi comes to write Adam Smith in Beijing, however, he ismuch more concerned with the question of ecological limits to capitalism. That themeprovides the concluding note of the book, suggesting the distance that a critic such as

Arrighi has traveled in the thirteen years that separate the publication of the two books.7 If,indeed, globalization and global warming are born of overlapping processes, the question is,How do we bring them together in our understanding of the world?

Not being a scientist myself, I also make a fundamental assumption about the science of climate change. I assume the science to be right in its broad outlines. I thus assume that the

views expressed particularly in the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations, in the Stern Review,and in the many books that have been published recently by scientists and scholars seekingto explain the science of global warming leave me with enough rational ground foraccepting, unless the scientific consensus shifts in a major way, that there is a large measureof truth to anthropogenic theories of climate change.8 For this position, I depend onobservations such as the following one reported by Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science atthe University of California, San Diego. Upon examining the abstracts of 928 papers onglobal warming published in specialized peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1993 and2003, Oreskes found that not a single one sought to refute the “consensus” among scientists“over the reality of human-induced climate change.” There is disagreement over the amountand direction of change. But “virtually all professional climate scientists,” writes Oreskes,“agree on the reality of human-induced climate change, but debate continues on tempo andmode.”9 Indeed, in what I have read so far, I have not seen any reason yet for remaining aglobal-warming skeptic.

The scientific consensus around the proposition that the present crisis of climate change isman-made forms the basis of what I have to say here. In the interest of clarity and focus, Ipresent my propositions in the form of four theses. The last three theses follow from the firstone. I begin with the proposition that anthropogenic explanations of climate change spellthe collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history and end by returning to the question I opened with: How does the crisis of climate changeappeal to our sense of human universals while challenging at the same time our capacity forhistorical understanding?

Thesis 1: Anthropogenic Explanations of Climate Change Spell the Collapse of the Age-oldHumanist Distinction between Natural History and Human History

Philosophers and students of history have often displayed a conscious tendency to separatehuman history— or the story of human affairs, as R. G. Collingwood put it—from naturalhistory, sometimes proceeding even to deny that nature could ever have history quite in thesame way humans have it. This practice itself has a long and rich past of which, for reasonsof space and personal limitations, I can only provide a very provisional, thumbnail, andsomewhat arbitrary sketch.10 We could begin with the old Viconian-Hobbesian idea that

we, humans, could have proper knowledge of only civil and political institutions because we



made them, while nature remains God’s work and ultimately inscrutable to man. “The trueis identical with the created: verum ipsum factum” is how Croce summarized Vico’s famousdictum.11 Vico scholars have sometimes protested that Vico did not make such a drasticseparation between the natural and the human sciences as Croce and others read into his

writings, but even they admit that such a reading is widespread.12

This Viconian understanding was to become a part of the historian’s common sense in thenineteenth and twentieth centuries. It made its way into Marx’s famous utterance that “menmake their own history, but they do not make it just as they please” and into the title of theMarxist archaeologist V. Gordon Childe’s well-known book, Man Makes Himself. 13 Croceseems to have been a major source of this distinction in the second half of the twentiethcentury through his influence on “the lonely Oxford historicist” Collingwood who, in turn,deeply influenced E. H. Carr’s 1961 book, What Is History? which is still perhaps one of the

best-selling books on the historian’s craft.14 Croce’s thoughts, one could say, unbeknown to

his legatees and with unforeseeable modifications, have triumphed in our understanding of history in the postcolonial age. Behind Croce and his adaptations of Hegel and hidden inCroce’s creative misreading of his predecessors stands the more distant and foundationalfigure of Vico.15 The connections here, again, are many and complex. Suffice it to say fornow that Croce’s 1911 book, La filosofia di Giambattista Vico, dedicated, significantly, to

Wilhelm Windelband, was translated into English in 1913 by none other than Collingwood, who was an admirer, if not a follower, of the Italian master.

However, Collingwood’s own argument for separating natural history from human onesdeveloped its own inflections, while running, one might say, still on broadly Viconian linesas interpreted by Croce. Nature, Collingwood remarked, has no “inside.” “In the case of nature, this distinction between the outside and the inside of an event does not arise. Theevents of nature are mere events, not the acts of agents whose thought the scientistendeavours to trace.” Hence, “all history properly so called is the history of human affairs.”The historian’s job is “to think himself into [an] action, to discern the thought of its agent.”

A distinction, therefore, has “to be made between historical and non-historical humanactions….Sofar as man’s conduct is determined by what may be called his animal nature, hisimpulses and appetites, it is non-historical; the process of those activities is a naturalprocess.” Thus, says Collingwood, “the historian is not interested in the fact that men eatand sleep and make love and thus satisfy their natural appetites; but he is interested in thesocial customs which they create by their thought as a framework within which theseappetites find satisfaction in ways sanctioned by convention and morality.” Only the history of the social construction of the body, not the history of the body as such, can be studied. By

splitting the human into the natural and the social or cultural, Collingwood saw no need to bring the two together.16

In discussing Croce’s 1893 essay “History Subsumed under the Concept of Art,” Collingwood wrote, “Croce, by denying [the German idea] that history was a science at all, cut himself atone blow loose from naturalism, and set his face towards an idea of history as somethingradically different from nature.”17 David Roberts gives a fuller account of the more matureposition in Croce. Croce drew on the writings of Ernst Mach and Henri Poincare´ to arguethat “the concepts of the natural sciences are human constructs elaborated for humanpurposes.” “When we peer into nature,” he said, “we find only ourselves.” We do not“understand ourselves best as part of the natural world.” So, as Roberts puts it, “Croce



proclaimed that there is no world but the human world, then took over the central doctrineof Vico that we can know the human world because we have made it.” For Croce, then, allmaterial objects were subsumed into human thought. No rocks, for example, existed inthemselves. Croce’s idealism, Roberts explains, “does not mean that rocks, for example,‘don’t exist’ without human beings to think them. Apart from human concern and language,they neither exist nor do not exist, since ‘exist’ is a human concept that has meaning only

within a context of human concerns and purposes.”18 Both Croce and Collingwood wouldthus enfold human history and nature, to the extent that the latter could be said to havehistory, into purposive human action. What exists beyond that does not “exist” because itdoes not exist for humans in any meaningful sense.

In the twentieth century, however, other arguments, more sociological or materialist, haveexisted alongside the Viconian one. They too have continued to justify the separation of human from natural history. One influential though perhaps infamous example would be

the booklet on the Marxist philosophy of history that Stalin published in 1938, Dialecticaland Historical Materialism. This is how Stalin put the problem:

Geographical environment is unquestionably one of the constant and indispensableconditions of development of society and, of course,… [it] accelerates or retards itsdevelopment. But its influence is not the determining influence, inasmuch as the changesand development of society proceed at an incomparably faster rate than the changes anddevelopment of geographical environment. In the space of 3000 years three different socialsystems have been successfully superseded in Europe: the primitive communal system, theslave system and the feudal system….Yet during this period geographical conditions inEurope have either not changed at all, or have changed so slightly that geography takes nonote of them. And that is quite natural. Changes in geographical environment of any importance require millions of years, whereas a few hundred or a couple of thousand yearsare enough for even very important changes in the system of human society. 19

For all its dogmatic and formulaic tone, Stalin’s passage captures an assumption perhapscommon to historians of the mid-twentieth century: man’s environment did change butchanged so slowly as to make the history of man’s relation to his environment almosttimeless and thus not a subject of historiography at all. Even when Fernand Braudelrebelled against the state of the discipline of history as he found it in the late 1930s andproclaimed his rebellion later in 1949 through his great book The Mediterranean, it wasclear that he rebelled mainly against historians who treated the environment simply as asilent and passive backdrop to their historical narratives, something dealt with in the

introductory chapter but forgotten thereafter, as if, as Braudel put it, “the flowers did notcome back every spring, the flocks of sheep migrate every year, or the ships sail on a real seathat changes with the seasons.” In composing The Mediterranean, Braudel wanted to write ahistory in which the seasons—“a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles”—andother recurrences in nature played an active role in molding human actions.20 Theenvironment, in that sense, had an agentive presence in Braudel’s pages, but the idea thatnature was mainly repetitive had a long and ancient history in European thought, asGadamer showed in his discussion of Johann Gustav Droysen.21 Braudel’s position was nodoubt a great advance over the kind of nature-as-a-backdrop argument that Stalindeveloped. But it shared a fundamental assumption, too, with the stance adopted by Stalin:the history of “man’s relationship to the environment” was so slow as to be “almost



timeless.”22 In today’s climatologists’ terms, we could say that Stalin and Braudel andothers who thought thus did not have available to them the idea, now widespread in theliterature on global warming, that the climate, and hence the overall environment, cansometimes reach a tipping point at which this slow and apparently timeless backdrop forhuman actions transforms itself with a speed that can only spell disaster for human beings.

If Braudel, to some degree, made a breach in the binary of natural/human history, one couldsay that the rise of environmental history in the late twentieth century made the breach

wider. It could even be argued that environmental historians have sometimes indeedprogressed towards producing what could be called natural histories of man. But there is a

very important difference between the understanding of the human being that thesehistories have been based on and the agency of the human now being proposed by scientists

writing on climate change. Simply put, environmental history, where it was notstraightforwardly cultural, social, or economic history, looked upon human beings as

biological agents. Alfred Crosby, Jr., whose book The Columbian Exchange did much topioneer the “new” environmental histories in the early 1970s, put the point thus in hisoriginal preface: “Man is a biological entity before he is a Roman Catholic or a capitalist oranything else.”23 The recent book by Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, isadventurous in attempting to connect knowledge gained from evolutionary andneurosciences with human histories. Smail’s book pursues possible connections between

biology and culture— between the history of the human brain and cultural history, inparticular—while being always sensitive to the limits of biological reasoning. But it is thehistory of human biology and not any recent theses about the newly acquired geologicalagency of humans that concerns Smail.24

Scholars writing on the current climate-change crisis are indeed saying somethingsignificantly different from what environmental historians have said so far. In unwittingly destroying the artificial but time-honored distinction between natural and human histories,climate scientists posit that the human being has become something much larger than thesimple biological agent that he or she always has been. Humans now wield a geologicalforce. As Oreskes puts it: “To deny that global warming is real is precisely to deny thathumans have become geological agents, changing the most basic physical processes of theearth.”

For centuries, [she continues,] scientists thought that earth processes were so large andpowerful that nothing we could do could change them. This was a basic tenet of geologicalscience: that human chronologies were insignificant compared with the vastness of

geological time; that human activities were insignificant compared with the force of geological processes. And once they were. But no more. There are now so many of us cuttingdown so many trees and burning so many billions of tons of fossil fuels that we have indeed

become geological agents. We have changed the chemistry of our atmosphere, causing sealevel to rise, ice to melt, and climate to change. There is no reason to think otherwise.25

Biological agents, geological agents—two different names with very different consequences.Environmental history, to go by Crosby’s masterful survey of the origins and the state of thefield in 1995, has much to do with biology and geography but hardly ever imagined humanimpact on the planet on a geological scale. It was still a vision of man “as a prisoner of climate,” as Crosby put it quoting Braudel, and not of man as the maker of it.26 To call



human beings geological agents is to scale up our imagination of the human. Humans are biological agents, both collectively and as individuals. They have always been so. There wasno point in human history when humans were not biological agents. But we can becomegeological agents only historically and collectively, that is, when we have reached

numbers and invented technologies that are on a scale large enough to have an impact onthe planet itself. To call ourselves geological agents is to attribute to us a force on the samescale as that released at other times when there has been a mass extinction of species. Weseem to be currently going through that kind of a period. The current “rate in the loss of species diversity,” specialists argue, “is similar in intensity to the event around 65 million

years ago which wiped out the dinosaurs.”27 Our footprint was not always that large.Humans began to acquire this agency only since the Industrial Revolution, but the processreally picked up in the second half of the twentieth century. Humans have becomegeological agents very recently in human history. In that sense, we can say that it is only

very recently that the distinction between human and natural histories—much of which had been preserved even in environmental histories that saw the two entities in interaction— has begun to collapse. For it is no longer a question simply of man having an interactive relation with nature. This humans have always had, or at least that is how man has been imagined ina large part of what is generally called the Western tradition.28 Now it is being claimed thathumans are a force of nature in the geological sense. A fundamental assumption of Western(and now universal) political thought has come undone in this crisis.29

Thesis 2: The Idea of the Anthropocene, the New Geological Epoch When Humans Exist as aGeological Force, Severely Qualifies Humanist Histories of Modernity/Globalization

How to combine human cultural and historical diversity with human freedom has formedone of the key underlying questions of human histories written of the period from 1750 tothe years of present-day globalization. Diversity, as Gadamer pointed out with reference toLeopold von Ranke, was itself a figure of freedom in the historian’s imagination of thehistorical process.30 Freedom has, of course, meant different things at different times,ranging from ideas of human and citizens’ rights to those of decolonization and self-rule.Freedom, one could say, is a blanket category for diverse imaginations of human autonomy and sovereignty. Looking at the works of Kant, Hegel, or Marx; nineteenth-century ideas of progress and class struggle; the struggle against slavery; the Russian and Chineserevolutions; the resistance to Nazism and Fascism; the decolonization movements of the1950s and 1960s and the revolutions in Cuba and Vietnam; the evolution and explosion of the rights discourse; the fight for civil rights for African Americans, indigenous peoples,

Indian Dalits, and other minorities; down to the kind of arguments that, say, Amartya Senput forward in his book Development as Freedom, one could say that freedom has been themost important motif of written accounts of human history of these two hundred and fifty

years. Of course, as I have already noted, freedom has not always carried the same meaningfor everyone. Francis Fukuyama’s understanding of freedom would be significantly differentfrom that of Sen. But this semantic capaciousness of the word only speaks to its rhetoricalpower.

In no discussion of freedom in the period since the Enlightenment was there ever any awareness of the geological agency that human beings were acquiring at the same time asand through processes closely linked to their acquisition of freedom. Philosophers of



freedom were mainly, and understandably, concerned with how humans would escape theinjustice, oppression, inequality, or even uniformity foisted on them by other humans orhuman-made systems. Geological time and the chronology of human histories remainedunrelated. This distance between the two calendars, as we have seen, is what climatescientists now claim has collapsed. The period I have mentioned, from 1750 to now, is alsothe time when human beings switched from wood and other renewable fuels to large-scaleuse of fossil fuel—first coal and then oil and gas. The mansion of modern freedoms standson an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use. Most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive. The period of human history usually associated with what we today think of as theinstitutions of civilization—the beginnings of agriculture, the founding of cities, the rise of the religions we know, the invention of writing— began about ten thousand years ago, as theplanet moved from one geological period, the last ice age or the Pleistocene, to the morerecent and warmer Holocene. The Holocene is the period we are supposed to be in; but thepossibility of anthropogenic climate change has raised the question of its termination. Now that humans—thanks to our numbers, the burning of fossil fuel, and other relatedactivities— have become a geological agent on the planet, some scientists have proposedthat we recognize the beginning of a new geological era, one in which humans act as a maindeterminant of the environment of the planet. The name they have coined for this new geological age is Anthropocene. The proposal was first made by the Nobel-winning chemistPaul J. Crutzen and his collaborator, a marine science specialist, Eugene F. Stoermer. In ashort statement published in 2000, they said, “Considering… [the] major and still growingimpacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales, itseems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology andecology by proposing to use the term ‘anthropocene’ for the current geological epoch.”31Crutzen elaborated on the proposal in a short piece published in Nature in 2002:

For the past three centuries, the effects of humans on the global environment haveescalated. Because of these anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, global climate may depart significantly from natural behaviour for many millennia to come. It seemsappropriate to assign the term “Anthropocene” to the present,… human-dominated,geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene—the warm period of the past 10–12millennia. The Anthropocene could be said to have started in the latter part of theeighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane. This date also happens tocoincide with James Watt’s design of the steam engine in 1784. 32

It is, of course, true that Crutzen’s saying so does not make the Anthropocene an officially

accepted geologic period. As Mike Davis comments, “in geology, as in biology or history,periodization is a complex, controversial art,” involving, always, vigorous debates andcontestation.33 The name Holocene for “the post-glacial geological epoch of the past ten totwelve thousand years” (“A,” p. 17), for example, gained no immediate acceptance whenproposed—apparently by Sir Charles Lyell—in 1833. The International Geological Congressofficially adopted the name at their meeting in Bologna after about fifty years in 1885 (see“A,” p. 17). The same goes for Anthropocene. Scientists have engaged Crutzen and hiscolleagues on the question of when exactly the Anthropocene may have begun. But theFebruary 2008 newsletter of the Geological Society of America, GSA Today, opens with astatement signed by the members of the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London accepting Crutzen’s definition and dating of the Anthropocene.34 Adopting a“conservative” approach, they conclude: “Sufficient evidence has emerged of



stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene— currently a vivid yet informal metaphor of global environmental change—asa new geological epoch to be considered for formalization by international discussion.”35There is increasing evidence that the term is gradually winning acceptance among socialscientists as well.36

So, has the period from 1750 to now been one of freedom or that of the Anthropocene? Isthe Anthropocene a critique of the narratives of freedom? Is the geological agency of humans the price we pay for the pursuit of freedom? In some ways, yes. As Edward O.

Wilson said in his The Future of Life: “Humanity has so far played the role of planetary killer, concerned only with its own short-term survival. We have cut much of the heart out of

biodiversity….If Emi, the Sumatran rhino could speak, she might tell us that the twenty-firstcentury is thus far no exception.”37 But the relation between Enlightenment themes of freedom and the collapsing of human and geological chronologies seems more complicated

and contradictory than a simple binary would allow. It is true that human beings havetumbled into being a geological agent through our own decisions. The Anthropocene, onemight say, has been an unintended consequence of human choices. But it is also clear thatfor humans any thought of the way out of our current predicament cannot but refer to theidea of deploying reason in global, collective life. As Wilson put it: “We know more about theproblem now….We know what to do” (FL, p. 102). Or, to quote Crutzen and Stoermer again:

Mankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years,to come. To develop a world-wide accepted strategy leading to sustainability of ecosystemsagainst human-induced stresses will be one of the great future tasks of mankind, requiringintensive research efforts and wise application of knowledge thus acquired….An exciting,

but also difficult and daunting task lies ahead of the global research and engineeringcommunity to guide mankind towards global, sustainable, environmental management.[“A,” p. 18]

Logically, then, in the era of the Anthropocene, we need the Enlightenment (that is, reason)even more than in the past. There is one consideration though that qualifies this optimismabout the role of reason and that has to do with the most common shape that freedom takesin human societies: politics. Politics has never been based on reason alone. And politics inthe age of the masses and in a world already complicated by sharp inequalities between andinside nations is something no one can control. “Sheer demographic momentum,” writesDavis, “will increase the world’s urban population by 3 billion people over the next 40 years(90% of them in poor cities), and no one—absolutely no one [including, one might say,

scholars on the Left]— has a clue how a planet of slums, with growing food and energy crises, will accommodate their biological survival, much less their inevitable aspirations to basic happiness and dignity” (“LIS”).

It is not surprising then that the crisis of climate change should produce anxieties precisely around futures that we cannot visualize. Scientists’ hope that reason will guide us out of thepresent predicament is reminiscent of the social opposition between the myth of Scienceand the actual politics of the sciences that Bruno Latour discusses in his Politics of Nature.38 Bereft of any sense of politics, Wilson can only articulate his sense of practicality as aphilosopher’s hope mixed with anxiety: “Perhaps we will act in time” (FL, p. 102). Yet the

very science of global warming produces of necessity political imperatives. Tim Flannery’s



book, for instance, raises the dark prospects of an “Orwellian nightmare” in a chapterentitled “2084: The Carbon Dictatorship?”39 Mark Maslin concludes his book with somegloomy thoughts: “It is unlikely that global politics will solve global warming. Technofixesare dangerous or cause problems as bad as the ones they are aimed at fixing…. [Global

warming] requires nations and regions to plan for the next 50 years, something that mostsocieties are unable to do because of the very short-term nature of politics.” Hisrecommendation, “we must prepare for the worst and adapt,” coupled with Davis’sobservations about the coming “planet of slums” places the question of human freedomunder the cloud of the Anthropocene.40

Thesis 3: The Geological Hypothesis Regarding the Anthropocene Requires Us to Put GlobalHistories of Capital in Conversation with the Species History of Humans

Analytic frameworks engaging questions of freedom by way of critiques of capitalist

globalization have not, in any way, become obsolete in the age of climate change. If anything, as Davis shows, climate change may well end up accentuating all the inequities of the capitalist world order if the interests of the poor and vulnerable are neglected (see“LIS”). Capitalist globalization exists; so should its critiques. But these critiques do not giveus an adequate hold on human history once we accept that the crisis of climate change ishere with us and may exist as part of this planet for much longer than capitalism or longafter capitalism has undergone many more historic mutations. The problematic of globalization allows us to read climate change only as a crisis of capitalist management.

While there is no denying that climate change has profoundly to do with the history of capital, a critique that is only a critique of capital is not sufficient for addressing questionsrelating to human history once the crisis of climate change has been acknowledged and the

Anthropocene has begun to loom on the horizon of our present. The geologic now of the Anthropocene has become entangled with the now of human history.

Scholars who study human beings in relation to the crisis of climate change and otherecological problems emerging on a world scale make a distinction between the recordedhistory of human beings and their deep history. Recorded history refers, very broadly, to theten thousand years that have passed since the invention of agriculture but more usually tothe last four thousand years or so for which written records exist. Historians of modernity and “early modernity” usually move in the archives of the last four hundred years. Thehistory of humans that goes beyond these years of written records constitutes what otherstudents of human pasts—not professional historians— call deep history. As Wilson, one of the main pro ponents of this distinction, writes: “Human behavior is seen as the product not

just of recorded history, ten thousand years recent, but of deep history, the combinedgenetic and cultural changes that created humanity over hundreds of [thousands of] years.”41 It, of course, goes to the credit of Smail that he has attempted to explain toprofessional historians the intellectual appeal of deep history.42

Without such knowledge of the deep history of humanity it would be difficult to arrive at asecular understanding of why climate change constitutes a crisis for humans. Geologists andclimate scientists may explain why the current phase of global warming—as distinct fromthe warming of the planet that has happened before—is anthropogenic in nature, but theensuing crisis for humans is not understandable unless one works out the consequences of that warming. The consequences make sense only if we think of humans as a form of life



and look on human history as part of the history of life on this planet. For, ultimately, whatthe warming of the planet threatens is not the geological planet itself but the very conditions, both biological and geological, on which the survival of human life as developedin the Holocene period depends.

The word that scholars such as Wilson or Crutzen use to designate life in the human form—and in other living forms—is species. They speak of the human being as a species and findthat category useful in thinking about the nature of the current crisis. It is a word that willnever occur in any standard history or political-economic analysis of globalization by scholars on the Left, for the analysis of globalization refers, for good reasons, only to therecent and recorded history of humans. Species thinking, on the other hand, is connected tothe enterprise of deep history. Further, Wilson and Crutzen actually find such thinkingessential to visualizing human well-being. As Wilson writes: “We need this longer view…notonly to understand our species but more firmly to secure its future” (SN, p. x). The task of

placing, historically, the crisis of climate change thus requires us to bring togetherintellectual formations that are somewhat in tension with each other: the planetary and theglobal; deep and recorded histories; species thinking and critiques of capital.

In saying this, I work somewhat against the grain of historians’ thinking on globalizationand world history. In a landmark essay published in 1995 and entitled “World History in aGlobal Age,” Michael Geyer and Charles Bright wrote, “At the end of the twentieth century,

we encounter, not a universalizing and single modernity but an integrated world of multipleand multiplying modernities.” “As far as world history is concerned,” they said, “there is nouniversalizing spirit…. There are, instead, many very specific, very material and pragmaticpractices that await critical reflection and historical study.” Yet, thanks to globalconnections forged by trade, empires, and capitalism, “we confront a startling new condition: humanity, which has been the subject of world history for many centuries andcivilizations, has now come into the purview of all human beings. This humanity isextremely polarized into rich and poor.”43 This humanity, Geyer and Bright imply in thespirit of the philosophies of difference, is not one. It does not, they write, “form a singlehomogenous civilization.” “Neither is this humanity any longer a mere species or a naturalcondition. For the first time,” they say, with some existentialist flourish, “we as human

beings collectively constitute ourselves and, hence, are responsible for ourselves” (“WH,” p.1059). Clearly, the scientists who advocate the idea of the Anthropocene are sayingsomething quite the contrary. They argue that because humans constitute a particular kindof species they can, in the process of dominating other species, acquire the status of ageologic force. Humans, in other words, have become a natural condition, at least today.

How do we create a conversation between these two positions?

It is understandable that the biological-sounding talk of species should worry historians.They feel concerned about their finely honed sense of contingency and freedom in humanaffairs having to cede ground to a more deterministic view of the world. Besides, there arealways, as Smail recognizes, dangerous historical examples of the political use of biology.44The idea of species, it is feared, in addition, may introduce a powerful degree of essentialismin our understanding of humans. I will return to the question of contingency later in thissection, but, on the issue of essentialism, Smail helpfully points out why species cannot bethought of in essentialist terms:



Species, according to Darwin, are not fixed entities with natural essences imbued in themby the Creator…. Natural selection does not homogenize the individuals of a species….Given this state of affairs, the search for a normal… nature and body type [of any

particular species] is futile. And so it goes for the equally futile quest to identify “humannature.” Here, as in so many areas, biology and cultural studies are fundamentallycongruent.45 It is clear that different academic disciplines position their practitioners differently withregard to the question of how to view the human being. All disciplines have to create theirobjects of study. If medicine or biology reduces the human to a certain specificunderstanding of him or her, humanist historians often do not realize that the protagonistsof their stories— persons—are reductions, too. Absent personhood, there is no humansubject of history. That is why Derrida earned the wrath of Foucault by pointing out that any desire to enable or allow madness itself to speak in a history of madness would be “themaddest aspect” of the project.46 An object of critical importance to humanists of alltraditions, personhood is nevertheless no less of a reduction of or an abstraction from theembodied and whole human being than, say, the human skeleton discussed in an anatomy class.

The crisis of climate change calls on academics to rise above their disciplinary prejudices,for it is a crisis of many dimensions. In that context, it is interesting to observe the role thatthe category of species has begun to play among scholars, including economists, who havealready gone further than historians in investigating and explaining the nature of this crisis.The economist Jeffrey Sachs’s book, Common Wealth, meant for the educated but lay public, uses the idea of species as central to its argument and devotes a whole chapter to the

Anthropocene.47 In fact, the scholar from whom Sachs solicited a foreword for his book wasnone other than Edward Wilson. The concept of species plays a quasi-Hegelian role in

Wilson’s foreword in the same way as the multitude or the masses in Marxist writings. If Marxists of various hues have at different times thought that the good of humanity lay in theprospect of the oppressed or the multitude realizing their own global unity through aprocess of coming into self- consciousness, Wilson pins his hope on the unity possiblethrough our collective self-recognition as a species: “Humanity has consumed ortransformed enough of Earth’s irreplaceable resources to be in better shape than ever

before. We are smart enough and now, one hopes, well informed enough to achieve self-understanding as a unified species….We will be wise to look on ourselves as a species.”48

Yet doubts linger about the use of the idea of species in the context of climate change, and it would be good to deal with one that can easily arise among critics on the Left. One could

object, for instance, that all the anthropogenic factors contributing to global warming—the burning of fossil fuel, industrialization of animal stock, the clearing of tropical and otherforests, and so on—are after all part of a larger story: the unfolding of capitalism in the Westand the imperial or quasi-imperial domination by the West of the rest of the world. It isfrom that recent history of the West that the elite of China, Japan, India, Russia, and Brazilhave drawn inspiration in attempting to develop their own trajectories toward superpowerpolitics and global domination through capitalist economic, technological, and military might. If this is broadly true, then does not the talk of species or mankind simply serve tohide the reality of capitalist production and the logic of imperial—formal, informal, ormachinic in a Deleuzian sense— domination that it fosters? Why should one include thepoor of the world—whose carbon footprint is small anyway— by use of such all- inclusive



terms as species or mankind when the blame for the current crisis should be squarely laid atthe door of the rich nations in the first place and of the richer classes in the poorer ones?

We need to stay with this question a little longer; otherwise the difference between thepresent historiography of globalization and the historiography demanded by anthropogenictheories of climate change will not be clear to us. Though some scientists would want to datethe Anthropocene from the time agriculture was invented, my readings mostly suggest thatour falling into the Anthropocene was neither an ancient nor an inevitable happening.Human civilization surely did not begin on condition that, one day in his history, man wouldhave to shift from wood to coal and from coal to petroleum and gas. That there was muchhistorical contingency in the transition from wood to coal as the main source of energy has

been demonstrated powerfully by Kenneth Pomeranz in his pathbreaking book The GreatDivergence. 49 Coincidences and historical accidents similarly litter the stories of the“discovery” of oil, of the oil tycoons, and of the automobile industry as they do any other

histories.50 Capitalist societies themselves have not remained the same since the beginningof capitalism.51

Human population, too, has dramatically increased since the Second World War. Indiaalone is now more than three times more populous than at independence in 1947. Clearly,nobody is in a position to claim that there is something inherent to the human species thathas pushed us finally into the Anthropocene. We have stumbled into it. The way to it was nodoubt through industrial civilization. (I do not make a distinction here between thecapitalist and socialist societies we have had so far, for there was never any principleddifference in their use of fossil fuel.)

If the industrial way of life was what got us into this crisis, then the question is, Why think in terms of species, surely a category that belongs to a much longer history? Why could notthe narrative of capitalism—and hence its critique— be sufficient as a framework forinterrogating the history of climate change and understanding its consequences? It seemstrue that the crisis of climate change has been necessitated by the high-energyconsumingmodels of society that capitalist industrialization has created and promoted, but the currentcrisis has brought into view certain other conditions for the existence of life in the humanform that have no intrinsic connection to the logics of capitalist, nationalist, or socialistidentities. They are connected rather to the history of life on this planet, the way differentlife-forms connect to one another, and the way the mass extinction of one species could spelldanger for another. Without such a history of life, the crisis of climate change has no human“meaning.” For, as I have said before, it is not a crisis for the inorganic planet in any

meaningful sense.

In other words, the industrial way of life has acted much like the rabbit hole in Alice’s story; we have slid into a state of things that forces on us a recognition of some of the parametric(that is, boundary) conditions for the existence of institutions central to our idea of modernity and the meanings we derive from them. Let me explain. Take the case of theagricultural revolution, so called, of ten thousand years ago. It was not just an expression of human inventiveness. It was made possible by certain changes in the amount of carbondioxide in the atmosphere, a certain stability of the climate, and a degree of warming of theplanet that followed the end of the Ice Age (the Pleistocene era)—things over which human

beings had no control. “There can be little doubt,” writes one of the editors of Humans at the



End of the Ice Age, “that the basic phenomenon—the waning of the Ice Age—was the resultof the Milankovich phenomena: the orbital and tilt relationships between the Earth and theSun.”52 The temperature of the planet stabilized within a zone that allowed grass to grow.Barley and wheat are among the oldest of such grasses. Without this lucky “long summer” or

what one climate scientist has called an “extraordinary” “fluke” of nature in the history of the planet, our industrial-agricultural way of life would not have been possible.53 In other

words, whatever our socioeconomic and technological choices, whatever the rights we wishto celebrate as our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions (such as thetemperature zone in which the planet exists) that work like boundary parameters of humanexistence. These parameters are independent of capitalism or socialism. They have beenstable for much longer than the histories of these institutions and have allowed human

beings to become the dominant species on earth. Unfortunately, we have now ourselves become a geological agent disturbing these parametric conditions needed for our ownexistence.

This is not to deny the historical role that the richer and mainly Western nations of the world have played in emitting greenhouse gases. To speak of species thinking is not to resistthe politics of “common but differentiated responsibility” that China, India, and otherdeveloping countries seem keen to pursue when it comes to reducing greenhouse gasemissions.54 Whether we blame climate change on those who are retrospectively guilty—that is, blame the West for their past performance— or those who are prospectively guilty (China has just surpassed the United States as the largest emitter of carbon dioxide, thoughnot on a per capita basis) is a question that is tied no doubt to the histories of capitalism andmodernization. 55 But scientists’ discovery of the fact that human beings have in the process

become a geological agent points to a shared catastrophe that we have all fallen into. Here ishow Crutzen and Stoermer describe that catastrophe:

The expansion of mankind…has been astounding…. During the past 3 centuries human population increased tenfold to 6000 million, accompanied e.g. by a growth in cattle population to 1400 million (about one cow per average size family)….In a few generationsmankind is exhausting the fossil fuels that were generated over several hundred millionyears. The release of SO2 …tothe atmosphere by coal and oil burning, is at least two timeslarger than the sum of all natural emissions…; more than half of all accessible fresh water is used by mankind; human activity has increased the species extinction rate by thousand to ten thousand fold in the tropical rain forests…. Furthermore, mankind releases manytoxic substances in the environment…. The effects documented include modification of thegeochemical cycle in large freshwater systems and occur in systems remote from primary

sources. [“A,” p. 17]Explaining this catastrophe calls for a conversation between disciplines and betweenrecorded and deep histories of human beings in the same way that the agriculturalrevolution of ten thousand years ago could not be explained except through a convergenceof three disciplines: geology, archaeology, and history.56

Scientists such as Wilson or Crutzen may be politically nai¨veinnot recognizing that reasonmay not be all that guides us in our effective collective choices—in other words, we may collectively end up making some unreasonable choices— but I find it interesting andsymptomatic that they speak the language of the Enlightenment. They are not necessarily anticapitalist scholars, and yet clearly they are not for business-as-usual capitalism either.



They see knowledge and reason providing humans not only a way out of this present crisis but a way of keeping us out of harm’s way in the future. Wilson, for example, speaks of devising a “wiser use of resources” in a manner that sounds distinctly Kantian (SN, p. 199).But the knowledge in question is the knowledge of humans as a species, a species dependenton other species for its own existence, a part of the general history of life. Changing theclimate, increasingly not only the average temperature of the planet but also the acidity andthe level of the oceans, and destroying the food chain are actions that cannot be in theinterest of our lives. These parametric conditions hold irrespective of our political choices. Itis therefore impossible to understand global warming as a crisis without engaging thepropositions put forward by these scientists. At the same time, the story of capital, thecontingent history of our falling into the Anthropocene, cannot be denied by recourse to theidea of species, for the Anthropocene would not have been possible, even as a theory,

without the history of industrialization. How do we hold the two together as we think thehistory of the world since the Enlightenment? How do we relate to a universal history of life—to universal thought, that is—while retaining what is of obvious value in ourpostcolonial suspicion of the universal? The crisis of climate change calls for thinkingsimultaneously on both registers, to mix together the immiscible chronologies of capital andspecies history. This combination, however, stretches, in quite fundamental ways, the very idea of historical understanding.

Thesis 4: The Cross-Hatching of Species History and the History of Capital Is a Process of Probing the Limits of Historical Understanding

Historical understanding, one could say following the Diltheyan tradition, entails criticalthinking that makes an appeal to some generic ideas about human experience. As Gadamerpointed out, Dilthey saw “the individual’s private world of experience as the starting pointfor an expansion that, in a living transposition, fills out the narrowness and fortuitousnessof his private experience with the infinity of what is available by re-experiencing thehistorical world.” “Historical consciousness,” in this tradition, is thus “a mode of self-knowledge” garnered through critical reflections on one’s own and others’ (historicalactors’) experiences.57 Humanist histories of capitalism will always admit of somethingcalled the experience of capitalism. E. P. Thompson’s brilliant attempt to reconstruct

working-class experience of capitalist labor, for instance, does not make sense without thatassumption.58 Humanist histories are histories that produce meaning through an appeal toour capacity not only to reconstruct but, as Collingwood would have said, to reenact in ourown minds the experience of the past.

When Wilson then recommends in the interest of our collective future that we achieve self-understanding as a species, the statement does not correspond to any historical way of understanding and connecting pasts with futures through the assumption of there being anelement of continuity to human experience. (See Gadamer’s point mentioned above.) Who isthe we? We humans never experience ourselves as a species. We can only intellectually comprehend or infer the existence of the human species but never experience it as such.There could be no phenomenology of us as a species. Even if we were to emotionally identify

with a word like mankind, we would not know what being a species is, for, in species history,humans are only an instance of the concept species as indeed would be any other life form.But one never experiences being a concept.



The discussion about the crisis of climate change can thus produce affect and knowledgeabout collective human pasts and futures that work at the limits of historical understanding.

We experience specific effects of the crisis but not the whole phenomenon. Do we then say, with Geyer and Bright, that “humanity no longer comes into being through ‘thought’”(“WH,” p. 1060) or say with Foucault that “the human being no longer has any history”?59Geyer and Bright go on to write in a Foucaultian spirit: “Its [world history’s] task is to maketransparent the lineaments of power, underpinned by information, that compress humanity into a single humankind” (“WH,” p. 1060).

This critique that sees humanity as an effect of power is, of course, valuable for all thehermeneutics of suspicion that it has taught postcolonial scholarship. It is an effectivecritical tool in dealing with national and global formations of domination. But I do not findit adequate in dealing with the crisis of global warming. First, inchoate figures of us all andother imaginings of humanity invariably haunt our sense of the current crisis. How else

would one understand the title of Weisman’s book, The World without Us, or the appeal of his brilliant though impossible attempt to depict the experience of New York after we aregone!60 Second, the wall between human and natural history has been breached. We may not experience ourselves as a geological agent, but we appear to have become one at thelevel of the species. And without that knowledge that defies historical understanding there isno making sense of the current crisis that affects us all. Climate change, refracted throughglobal capital, will no doubt accentuate the logic of inequality that runs through the rule of capital; some people will no doubt gain temporarily at the expense of others. But the wholecrisis cannot be reduced to a story of capitalism. Unlike in the crises of capitalism, there areno lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged (witness the drought in Australia or recentfires in the wealthy neighborhoods of California). The anxiety global warming gives rise to isreminiscent of the days when many feared a global nuclear war. But there is a very important difference. A nuclear war would have been a conscious decision on the part of thepowers that be. Climate change is an unintended consequence of human actions and shows,only through scientific analysis, the effects of our actions as a species. Species may indeed

be the name of a placeholder for an emergent, new universal history of humans that flashesup in the moment of the danger that is climate change. But we can never understand thisuniversal. It is not a Hegelian universal arising dialectically out of the movement of history,or a universal of capital brought forth by the present crisis. Geyer and Bright are right toreject those two varieties of the universal. Yet climate change poses for us a question of ahuman collectivity, an us, pointing to a figure of the universal that escapes our capacity toexperience the world. It is more like a universal that arises from a shared sense of acatastrophe. It calls for a global approach to politics without the myth of a global identity,for, unlike a Hegelian universal, it cannot subsume particularities. We may provisionally callit a “negative universal history.”61

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Greg Dening.

Thanks are due to Lauren Berlant, James Chandler, Carlo Ginzburg, Tom Mitchell, SheldonPollock, Bill Brown, Franc¸oise Meltzer, Debjani Ganguly, Ian Hunter, Julia A. Thomas, andRochona Majumdar for critical comments on an earlier draft. I wrote the first version of this



essay in Bengali for a journal in Calcutta and remain grateful to its editor, Asok Sen, forencouraging me to work on this topic.

1. Alan Weisman, The World without Us (New York, 2007), pp. 3–5. Critical Inquiry 35(Winter 2009) © 2008 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/09/3502-0004$10.00. Allrights reserved.

2. See C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections andComparisons (Malden, Mass., 2004).

3. The prehistory of the science of global warming going back to nineteenth-century European scientists like Joseph Fourier, Louis Agassiz, and Arrhenius is recounted in many popular publications. See, for example, the book by Bert Bolin, the chairman of the UN’sIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1988–1997), A History of the Science andPolitics of Climate Change: The Role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(Cambridge, 2007), pt. 1.

4. Quoted in Mark Bowen, Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. JamesHansen and the Truth of Global Warming (New York, 2008), p. 1.

5. Quoted in ibid., p. 228. See also “Too Hot to Handle: Recent Efforts to Censor JimHansen,” Boston Globe, 5 Feb. 2006,p.E1.

6. See, for example, Walter K. Dodds, Humanity’s Footprint: Momentum, Impact, and OurGlobal Environment (New York, 2008), pp. 11– 62. 200 Dipesh Chakrabarty / The Climateof History

7. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of OurTimes (1994; London, 2006), p. 356; see Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of theTwenty- First Century (London, 2007), pp. 227–389.

8. An indication of the growing popularity of the topic is the number of books published inthe last four years with the aim of educating the general reading public about the nature of the crisis. Here is a random list of some of the most recent titles that inform this essay:Mark Maslin, Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2004); Tim Flannery,The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change (Melbourne,2005); David Archer, Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast (Malden, Mass., 2007);Global Warming, ed. Kelly Knauer (New York, 2007); Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Futureon a Hotter Planet (Washington, D.C., 2008); William H. Calvin, Global Fever: How toTreat Climate Change (Chicago, 2008); James Hansen, “Climate Catastrophe,” New Scientist, 28 July–3 Aug. 2007, pp. 30–34; Hansen et al., “Dangerous Human-MadeInterference with Climate: A GISS ModelE Study,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 7,no. 9 (2007): 2287–2312; and Hansen et al., “Climate Change and Trace Gases,”Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 15 July 2007, pp. 1925–54. See alsoNicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The “Stern Review” (Cambridge, 2007).



9. Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know We’reNot Wrong?” in Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and OurGrandchildren, ed. Joseph F. C. Dimento and Pamela Doughman (Cambridge, Mass., 2007),pp. 73, 74.

10. A long history of this distinction is traced in Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: TheHistory of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. Lydia G.Cochrane (1979; Chicago, 1984).

11. Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, trans. R. G. Collingwood (1913;202 Dipesh Chakrabarty / The Climate of History New Brunswick, N.J., 2002), p. 5. CarloGinzburg has alerted me to problems with Collingwood’s translation.

12. See the discussion in Perez Zagorin, “Vico’s Theory of Knowledge: A Critique,”Philosophical Quarterly 34 (Jan. 1984): 15–30.

13. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, trans. pub., 3 vols. (Moscow, 1969), 1:398. See V. Gordon Childe,Man Makes Himself (London, 1941). Indeed, Althusser’s revolt in the 1960s againsthumanism in Marx was in part a jihad against the remnants of Vico in the savant’s texts; seeEtienne Balibar, personal communication to author, 1 Dec. 2007. I am grateful to IanBedford for drawing my attention to complexities in Marx’s connections to Vico.

14. David Roberts describes Collingwood as “the lonely Oxford historicist…, in importantrespects a follower of Croce’s” (David D. Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism [Berkeley, 1987], p. 325).

15. On Croce’s misreading of Vico, see the discussion in general in Cecilia Miller,Giambattista Vico: Imagination and Historical Knowledge (Basingstoke, 1993), and JamesC. Morrison, “Vico’s Principle of Verum is Factum and the Problem of Historicism,” Journalof the History of Ideas 39 (Oct.–Dec. 1978): 579–95.

16. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946; New York, 1976), pp. 214, 212, 213, 216. 17.Ibid., p. 193. 18. Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism, pp. 59, 60, 62. 204

19. Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938), www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm

20. Fernand Braudel, “Preface to the First Edition,” The Mediterranean and theMediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siaˆn Reynolds, 2 vols. (1949; London,1972), 1:20. See also Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The “Annales” School,1929– 89 (Stanford, Calif., 1990), pp. 32–64.

21. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer andDonald G. Marshall (1975, 1979; London, 1988), pp. 214–18. See also Bonnie G. Smith,



“Gender and the Practices of Scientific History: The Seminar and Archival Research in theNineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 100 (Oct. 1995): 1150–76.

22. Braudel, “Preface to the First Edition,” p. 20.

23. Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequencesof 1492 (1972; London, 2003), p. xxv.

24. See Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley, 2008), pp. 74–189. 25.Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus,” p. 93. 26. Crosby Jr., “The Past and Present of Environmental History,” American Historical Review 100 (Oct. 1995): 1185.

27. Will Steffen, director of the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at the Australian National University, quoted in “Humans Creating New ‘Geological Age,’” The Australian, 31 Mar. 2008, www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,23458148-5006787,00.html. Steffen’s reference was the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report of 2005. See also Neil Shubin, “The Disappearance of Species,” Bulletin of the American

Academy of Arts and Sciences 61 (Spring 2008): 17–19.

28. Bill McKibben’s argument about the “end of nature” implied the end of nature as “aseparate realm that had always served to make us feel smaller” (Bill McKibben, The End of Nature [1989; New York, 2006], p. xxii).

29. Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans.Catherine Porter (1999; Cambridge, Mass., 2004), written before the intensification of thedebate on global warming, calls into question the entire tradition of organizing the idea of politics around the assumption of a separate realm of nature and points to the problemsthat this assumption poses for contemporary questions of democracy.

30. Gadamer, Truth and Method,p. 206: The historian “knows that everything could have been different, and every acting individual could have acted differently.”

31. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” IGBP [InternationalGeosphere-Biosphere Programme] Newsletter 41 (2000): 17; hereafter abbreviated “A.”

32. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature, 3 Jan. 2002,p. 23. 33. Mike Davis, “Living onthe Ice Shelf: Humanity’s Meltdown,” 26 June 2008, tomdispatch.com/post/174949;hereafter abbreviated “LIS.” I am grateful to Lauren Berlant for bringing this essay to my attention.

34. See William F. Ruddiman, “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago,” Climatic Change 61, no. 3 (2003): 261–93; Crutzen and Steffen, “How LongHave We Been in the Anthropocene Era?” Climatic Change 61, no. 3 (2003): 251–57; andJan Zalasiewicz et al., “Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?” GSA Today 18 (Feb.2008): 4– 8.I am grateful to Neptune Srimal for this reference.



35. Zalasiewicz et al., “Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?” p. 7. Davis described theLondon Society as “the world’s oldest association of Earth scientists, founded in 1807”(“LIS”).

36. See, for instance, Libby Robin and Steffen, “History for the Anthropocene,” History Compass 5, no. 5 (2007): 1694–1719, and Jeffrey D. Sachs, “The Anthropocene,” Common

Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (New York, 2008), pp. 57– 82. Thanks to DebjaniGanguly for drawing my attention to the essay by Robin and Steffen, and to Robin forsharing it with me.

37. Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York, 2002), p. 102; hereafter abbreviatedFL. Critical Inquiry / Winter 2009

38. See Latour, Politics of Nature.

39. Flannery, The Weather Makers, p. xiv. Dipesh Chakrabarty / The Climate of History

40. Maslin, Global Warming,p. 147. For a discussion of how fossil fuels created both thepossibilities for and the limits of democracy in the twentieth century, see Timothy Mitchell,“Carbon Democracy,” forthcoming in Economy and Society. I am grateful to Mitchell forletting me cite this unpublished paper. Critical Inquiry / Winter 2009

41. Wilson, In Search of Nature (Washington, D.C., 1996), pp. ix–x; hereafter abbreviatedSN.

42. See Smail, On Deep History and the Brain.

43. Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “World History in a Global Age,” American HistoricalReview 100 (Oct. 1995): 1058–59; hereafter abbreviated “WH.”

44. See Smail, On Deep History and the Brain,p. 124. Critical Inquiry / Winter 2009

45. Ibid. pp. 124–25.

46. Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” Writing and Difference, trans.

Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), p. 34.

47. See Sachs, Common Wealth, pp. 57– 82.

48. Wilson, foreword to Sachs, Common Wealth, p. xii. Students of Marx may be remindedhere of the use of the category “species being” by the young Marx. 216 Dipesh Chakrabarty /The Climate of History

49. See Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of theModern World Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2000).



50. See Mitchell, “Carbon Democracy.” See also Edwin Black, Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives(New York, 2006).

51. Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century is a good guide to these fluctuations in thefortunes of capitalism. Critical Inquiry / Winter 2009

52. Lawrence Guy Straus, “The World at the End of the Last Ice Age,” in Humans at the Endof the Ice Age: The Archaeology of the Pleistocene–Holocene Transition, ed. Lawrence Guy Straus et al. (New York, 1996), p. 5.

53. Flannery, Weather Makers, pp. 63, 64.

54. Ashish Kothari, “The Reality of Climate Injustice,” The Hindu, 18 Nov. 2007, www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mag/2007/11/18/stories/2007111850020100.htm

55. I have borrowed the idea of “retrospective” and “prospective” guilt from a discussion ledat the Franke Institute for the Humanities by Peter Singer during the Chicago HumanitiesFestival, November 2007.

56. See Colin Tudge, Neanderthals, Bandits, and Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began(New Haven, Conn., 1999), pp. 35–36. 220

57. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 232, 234. See also Michael Ermarth, Wilhelm Dilthey:

The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago, 1978), pp. 310–22.

58. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1963).

59. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Knowledge, trans.pub. (1966; New York, 1973), p. 368.

60. See Weisman, The World without Us, pp. 25–28. 222

61. I am grateful to Antonio Y. Vasquez-Arroyo for sharing with me his unpublished paper“Universal History Disavowed: On Critical Theory and Postcolonialism,” where he has tried

to develop this concept of negative universal history on the basis of his reading of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin.

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